Chapter 15 #3
“I think about that summer more than I let on,” he says.
“How good it was. How I let myself think it was simple back then, just because I was young enough not to know better.” He tucks a wet strand of hair behind my ear, careful, like the gesture matters more than he wants it to.
“I don’t get to go back and be the version of me who didn’t wreck it.
I know that. I’m not asking you to pretend otherwise. ”
I turn my face into his palm, just slightly, and let him feel that I heard it, all of it, before either of us has to put a name to what saying it took.
He lets out a breath, slow, and some of the weight in his shoulders goes with it. I watch him understand what I just did, handing him something gentler than forgiveness and just as hard to earn. He settles around it before he lets himself move past it.
He lifts an eyebrow, the mood shifting easy under him like it always does. “I’ve got nowhere else to be today. Can I try giving you another one? Purely in the interest of testing how that jade does its work.”
“That’s very generous of you. Purely scientific.”
“Experiments need multiple data sets. We can perform it in every setting we can dream up.”
“We’ve already muddied the data set with too many variables,” I say. “But more experimenting is definitely required.”
His smirk is hot and dirty, which has me squirming beneath him already. He shifts down the length of me, deliberate, dragging his tongue down and nipping at my stomach, my hip, then he lowers his entire mouth over my sex. My hips buck and his hands press down on my thighs.
“Fuck, you’re beautiful.” His voice comes out rough against my skin, the hum of it sending bursts of electricity straight to my already wet slit. “Your pussy is the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve been thinking about that fact for days.”
When he finally settles between my thighs he doesn’t rush a single second of it.
His tongue finds the stone and circles it slow, patient in a way that has nothing to do with restraint and everything to do with a man who’s decided this is the only thing worth doing with his mouth for as long as it takes.
My hand finds his hair, not guiding so much as holding on, and I stop tracking sightlines and exits, stop doing anything at all except feeling the slow, devastating build he keeps just shy of too much. I close my eyes and feel every spark of the building pressure.
I come apart under that excruciatingly attentive mouth with the sun still warm on my skin and his name breaking out of me: the orgasm is wild and intense that he’s earned twice now.
He surfaces after, pressing one last kiss to my inner thigh before he stretches out beside me again, looking entirely too pleased with himself.
“Worth the wait,” he says.
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.” He props himself on one elbow, watching me like everything he’s decided matters. “That’s twice now. Fast, both times. Is that the jewelry doing the work, or is it me?”
“Ask a less dangerous question, Sullivan.”
“I’m asking this one.”
I could give him the easy answer. The clinical one, the one I’ve given every man since Nashville who’s earned even that much explanation. I don’t reach for it.
“The jewelry helps,” I say instead. “It’s not nothing.
But I’ve been with other men who had access to the same piece and it didn’t turn out like this.
” I make myself hold his eyes instead of the looking away.
“You never missed. Not once, the whole summer I was twenty. Every single time, like it was nothing, like you weren’t even trying that hard.
I spent years telling myself that was just youth, or luck, or a fluke I’d never find again with anyone else.
And now we’re doing this again and it doesn’t feel like muscle memory, Dawson.
It feels new. Like my whole body forgot how to do this with anyone else and just remembered how to do it with you. ”
His face isn’t smug at all now, gone soft and a little wrecked in a way I don’t think he means to let me see.
“Sage,” he says, gravel in it. “I plan on being the only answer to that question from here on out.”
“I’m starting to believe you,” I say, and I mean it more than I expect to.
He lowers his lips to mine and says the words right against my mouth. “Believe it.”
After another minute of warming in the sun, Dawson pushes up onto his feet, stretching out the last of the cold. It puts him eye level with the granite shelf rising just above where we’ve been lying. He goes still, one hand raised.
“What?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer right away. He reaches out and picks something up out of a crevice in the rock, small and dark, hidden where nobody swimming below would ever think to look.
A camera mount. Weatherproofed, recent, bolted into a bracket somebody drilled directly into the granite.
Shell casings, three of them, sit half-buried in the dirt a few feet further along, old enough to have tarnished but not old enough to have been here longer than a season.
My whole body goes frigid in a way that has nothing to do with the water.
“Nobody hikes this far just to plant a camera,” I say. “This isn’t a trail anyone stumbles onto. Somebody had to know where to climb and what they were looking for.”
“And the casings.” Dawson’s jaw tightens. “Nobody fires a weapon by accident up here. Somebody was watching long enough, and close enough, to need to defend the position, or they were testing the sightline.”
He turns the mount over in his hand, checking the housing, and his whole expression closes down before he says a word, gone still and careful. He’s found something he wishes he hadn’t.
There’s a tag riveted into the base, small, easy to miss unless you’re looking for exactly this.
Sullivan Transport asset inventory. A code stamped beneath it, the same font his company uses on every truck in the yard.
His own equipment. Watching the one place in this whole valley that was supposed to belong to only us.